An SK Kind of Wedding

Chapter 6

Three days ago

Nick and I approached the gifts slowly, our hands clasped tightly together. We didn't know what to expect. To think Kurt could have sent us a bomb and we wouldn't have known! Maybe he did . . . so we needed to find out what he sent.

Nick and I set about carefully unwrapping each of the gifts. There were almost twenty gifts of varying sizes. We started out with those gifts coming from people we were not immediately familiar with.

Every time we opened a box, we did so with such care and dread that at one point it had become ridiculous.

"What if he's just playing with us?" I asked out loud, frustrated. We've gone through five gifts and they were seemingly normal items from the gift registry we signed up for. We called each of the gift giver to thank them, and secretly to confirm that they did give the gift. It was slow work.

"Maybe he is, but we don't have any choice, right? We need to check everything out. Because if there was just a little chance . . . I would rather we leave this apartment and we just stay somewhere else," Nick said calmly.

No, as I had said before, I didn't want Kurt to get the satisfaction that he had scared us, or had made us run away with our tails between our legs!

We opened another five boxes. Confirmed. So far, so good.

Ten boxes to go.

As SK lovers, we started speculating what would be in Kurt's gift box, if it did exist. It was mostly Nick providing the potential scenarios and me reacting.

"A severed hand?"

"Whose hand?"

"His?"

"Ew!"

"See! It would affect you!" I threw a big crumpled wad of gift wrapping right at Nick. He dodged it and laughed.

Eight boxes to go.

"A dead cat?" Nick looked at me seriously.

"Wouldn't we be smelling anything dead by now?"

"What if it was embalmed?"

"An embalmed cat?"

"Okay what if it was a dead cat that was reanimated?"

I smiled, thinking yeah, Pet Sematary!

"And that would affect me because--?"

"You like cats?"

I laughed.

Six boxes.

"Wait, I got it!" Nick slapped his forehead.

"What?"

"A box filled with the ripped Dark Tower series books!"

I stopped what I was doing and looked at Nick. I was serious.

"He wouldn't dare!"

"But that would affect you, wouldn't it?"

"Of course! No one rips books apart, especially SK's, and especially that series!"

Four boxes.

"A big, live spider!"

I stopped.

"Poisonous?"

"Yes!"

"Dang, would he do that? That would be almost murder! What about a cobra or another type of poisonous snake?"

"Or a scorpion!"

That made us more careful in opening the remaining boxes.

We're down to one small box. It listed my best friend from college as the giver.

"It can't be this one."

"We opened everything else, we need to open this."

"She's part of the entourage, for crying out loud!" I said, tired.

"We need to open it just to be sure."

We did and inside . . . was a clown's red nose and a card that said, 'Hey Nerd Boy, I am your number one fan!'

"Oh, dear lord," I whisper. It was my favorite SK book hands down, but it also meant that I was deathly terrified of clowns. Misery was another favorite SK book of mine, because that was not a supernatural thriller, but still a great psychological thriller, and I was painfully aware of what those words on the card meant and how they were said by the deranged fan to her captive author.

"I thought you said he didn't read? He seems to know a lot about SK imagery," Nick said, hugging me close.

"I told you, he's crazy," I whispered hoarsely. The tears were streaming down my cheeks.

"Do you think he's crazy enough to do something more than threats and mind games?"

I nodded. "I wouldn't be surprised."